Strip tab characters from multiple text files and replace them with spaces (or something else)

[delladea]

I switch between Gedit, Notepad++, and vim fairly often depending on what I'm doing and whose computer I'm on. Sometimes I end up with tab characters where I really wanted four spaces, mainly when I'm using vim and I haven't figured out how to get vim to not do this. Gedit and Notepad++ have settings to use spaces instead of tabs, so there's no issue there.

Either I don't notice the tab characters until after I've put lots of them in the file I'm editing, or I'm editing a file from someone else whose editor uses tab characters for indentation. I know its not a big deal to some people, but tab indentation mixed with space indentation is a huge pet peeve of mine.

Thus, a perl script was born:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w use File::Copy; # This script replaces tab characters in a file with four spaces, or whatever else you want $num_args = $#ARGV + 1; $num_warnings = 0; $tab_replace = " "; # Change this to whatever you want in place of tabs if ( $num_args == 0 ) { print "usage: strip-tabs.pl file1 [file2, file3...]\n"; exit; } # Have files to parse... for my $f ( 0 .. ($num_args - 1) ) { if ( open(INPUTFILE, "<$ARGV[$f]") ) { if ( open(OUTPUTFILE, ">$ARGV[$f]~") ) { # Start parsing the file while ( my $line = <INPUTFILE> ) { $line =~ s/\t/$tab_replace/g; print OUTPUTFILE $line; } # Copy over original file here close(OUTPUTFILE); close(INPUTFILE); if ( !move("$ARGV[$f]~", $ARGV[$f]) ) { print "Could not write output to file $ARGV[$f]: $!\n"; $num_warnings += 1; } } else { close(INPUTFILE); print "Could not create output file for $ARGV[$f]: $!\n"; $num_warnings += 1; } } else { print "Could not open $ARGV[$f] for reading: $!\n"; $num_warnings += 1; } } die "$num_warnings warnings encountered during file operation." unless $num_warnings == 0;
View Gist (strip-tabs.pl)

Feel free to gank away if you find it useful!

Comments

[mark]

Cool, thanks for sharing!

Another way of doing this is using sed, like this:

sed -ie 's/\t/ /g' yourfile.pl

That will replace all tabs with four spaces in yourfile.pl. You can do it in all files of a certain type with something like this:

find -name \*.pl -exec sed -ie 's/\t/ /g' {} \;

That will find all Perl files (starting in the current directory and going down, so it'll recurse into any subdirectories) and replace the tabs with spaces.

These work from a Linux/Mac command line. Windows, you're out of luck.

[momijizukamori]

Gedit and Notepad++ have settings to use spaces instead of tabs, so there's no issue there.

I did not know this setting existed in gedit until right now. Congratulations, you have just made my day more magical.

[pne]

Would you be interested in some comments on the Perl code and suggestions for other ways to do things?